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Legislators face a deluge of hard-to-reconcile data, some of which suggests voters are also confused.
AP Photo

Republican pollster Whit Ayres notes that issues like health care are particularly susceptible to variation. “This health care debate is exactly the kind of issue on which public opinion is unstable and moves with additional information,” he says. “It is a highly complex issue with lots of moving parts, that even people who are paying close attention to the debate have difficulty fully understanding.”

ABC News pollster Gary Langer believes that “the contradiction is really not a failure of the public to make sense but a failure of the analyst to make sense of the information he or she has collected.”

And indeed, the true value of these polls may lie in the spaces between those who think something is “very likely” and those who are merely “somewhat concerned” about it, or those who approve of a “government plan” but not a “government-run plan.” Public opinion in this case is like a three-dimensional object — the more angles you see it from, the better you understand it.

“My philosophy about this is that we’re better off seeing multiple polls asking about something many different ways, laying them end to end,” he adds.

Still, the amount of misinformation — and plain old confusion — among voters raises the question of whether legislators should be crediting polls at all.

“I think it’s hard for voters to grasp the issues, because there’s been such polarized discussions on health care,” says West. “It’s hard for them to figure out what the facts are, let alone what the future impacts would be.”

One outfit that has raised the issue is Public Policy Polling, the Democratic pollster that asked whether respondents thought Obama was the Antichrist. When they asked in another survey whether the government should “stay out of Medicare” — an impossibility — 39 percent said yes.

“We asked the Medicare question to sort of get out there how much misunderstanding there is out there about the health care debate,” explains PPP Communications Director Tom Jensen.

The results, however, are debatable — respondents might have said they wanted the government to “stay out of Medicare” because they don’t want anyone to change the program — not because they don’t know who runs it, for example. And as for the Antichrist question, Jensen notes that they should have asked the same question about former President George W. Bush for comparison. They plan to remedy the error this week.

“Some would argue that we really shouldn’t even be looking at public opinion, because it’s not informed,” acknowledges Blumenthal. “But like it or not, we live in a democracy, and people get to vote every two years.”

Which means public opinion — however it is derived — matters. So legislators hoping for clear-cut answers are probably out of luck — and should accept their fate, say several pollsters.

Unlike an election, there is no deadline for voters to make a decision about health care reform — and some never will. “I think public opinion is getting pretty close to being as well-developed as its going to be right now,” says Blumenthal.

Adds Langer: “We want to boil the world down into a simple convenient number, when life is a little more complicated than that.”

Here is a solid poll by one of the best in the business , broke down by Congressional Districts.

The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 291 of the 435 Congressional Districts nationwide, or almost exactly two-thirds. -- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 235 of 257 Democratic-held districts. -- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 34 of 52 Blue Dog - held districts, and has overall popularity of 51 percent in these districts versus 39 percent opposed.

Obviously, there is a margin of error inherent to this analysis when applied to any individual district. The polls that inform this analysis themselves have a margin of error, and there is an additional layer of error introduced by the statistical process that we apply to the data. But in Ross's district, for what it's worth, the projected numbers are 49 percent in favor of a public option and 41 percent opposed.

The districts represented in blue in the map below are those where we'd project the public option to have plurality support if a poll were conducted there; those in red are where we expect a plurality to oppose it:

These polls are all unreliable because people are confused. It doesn't help that Republicans have been making ridiculou claims in an attempt to poison the well.

I think any Democrat in Congress who is confused about what needs to be done need only remember what Bill Kristol instructed Republicans to do in 1993: For their own political survival, kill the bill. Whatever Bill Kristol says, a good Democrat should do the exact opposite.

Sunday, September 27, 2009 CBO: Dropping public option to cost $110 billion; and public option insurance premiums would cost you 10% less than your current private plan by John Aravosis (DC) on 9/27/2009 10:45:00 AM

Now there's a bombshell. Advocates of the public option have been saying for a while that one of the good, and necessary, things about it is that it saves money. Now the CBO apparently agrees.

The National Journal is reporting that the CBO determined the robust public option favored by progressives would save the government $110 billion. A weaker “level playing field” public option would only save $25 billion.

This means removing the robust public option from the House bill would require a corresponding $110 billion reduction in affordablity tax credits. Depending on the final shape of the bill that would be somewhere between a 14%-23% reduction in the amount of tax credits to working class Americans. From different CBO reports (1,2) we know that in 2019 the average tax credit for an enrollee in the exchange, who needs help with affording health insurance, will be between $5,000-$6,000. Eliminating the robust public option would reduce the amount of tax credits to an individual by roughly $1,000.

The CBO also reported that, “on average the [robust] public plan would be about 10 percent cheaper than a typical private plan.”

This puts members of Congress and the administration in a tough spot. If they don't push for a public option, then they're pushing to needlessly increase the deficit, and to make your own monthly premiums more expensive than they need to be. The reason? It would be unfair to doctors, who already make half a million a year, if your insurance premiums went down 10%. If anything, we should be ****ed that the public option only lowers premiums by 10%. If that's the case, then maybe we need something even stronger, like single payer.

The more people find out these kind of details, the more I think they're going to be increasingly unhappy with what Max Baucus and the Blue Dogs are proposing.

Why is he variance in the poll resuts surprising? Nearly all polls are not run for the purpose of finding out what the public thinks, but for the purpose of pushing a particular result. They're generally funded by someone who has a vested interest in seeing a certain result come about, or they are of a certain political persuasion. But let me make it real easy. There are always two sides in polls like this - the ones who think they're going to get something for nothing, who are for it, and the ones who know darn well that they're going to end up paying the health care costs of everyone else, who are against it.

IT. Here's a thought, why not roll out the final healthcare bill to the American public and let them review it for 30 days. Then take a vote/poll. It amazes me that the dems are critizing anyone that does not support the bill and the bill is not yet finished.

The whole issue is about corruption. 85% of Americans like their health care options. We have these educated idiots in DC trying to destroy it all for a supposedly 15% of the population for more control and to free up funds for the unions to increasse padding their "bought and paid for" politicians pockets. Americans are not as stupid or gullible as the politicians, media and academia think.

IT. Here's a thought, why not roll out the final healthcare bill to the American public and let them review it for 30 days. Then take a vote/poll. It amazes me that the dems are critizing anyone that does not support the bill and the bill is not yet finished.

That is the LAST thing that the GOP and health insurers want. They know for a fact that they would be toast.

1.) Where the money is going to come from for all of this medical care is extremely uncertain.

2.) Where the medical personnel are going to come from is equally uncertain.

America is not taking care of its most vulnerable citizens NOW - People with Disabilities. What makes anyone in this entire nation think that some kind of, 'health care reform process,' throughout the entire process of which neither Mr. Obama nor this administration of his have even *mentioned* a larger population of these same people with disabilities than the number of supposedly uninsured citizens in this nation, is going to make a damn bit of difference is beyond me.

I also do not understand how the continued outright looting of Medicare while using it to prop-up a supposed, 'public option,' is going to work either.

Nate Silver (the most accurate pollster by far in the 2008 elections) has been running an interesting series of stories on "polling firm" Strategic Vision LLC.

Strategic LLC is under fire for only releasing results and refusing to provide any details about their methodology, what call centers they use, quality controls, etc. Things that any reputable pollster should be willing to release so outside groups can access the validity of their results. They've also been caught red-handed with lying about their firm. For example, they claimed to have multiple offices around the country but all the addresses turned out to be locations of UPS Stores.

Silver has done an in-depth analysis of the results they have released and there is strong statistical evidence Strategic Vision LLC is just making up their numbers out of thin air. No kidding. Not being sloppy with their numbers. Just "making them up whole cloth" as Silver puts it.

One of the Strategic Vision LLC polls that got some attention recently was the one about only 2.8% of Oklahoma high school students being able to pass the U.S. Citizenship test (23% knew George Washington was our first president, etc). That poll, by the way, was funded by a conservative think tank that is anti-public education.

(Pause here for the "I can't believe a conservative group would push false poll numbers to advance their agenda" outrage).

IT. Here's a thought, why not roll out the final healthcare bill to the American public and let them review it for 30 days. Then take a vote/poll. It amazes me that the dems are critizing anyone that does not support the bill and the bill is not yet finished.

Agreed I also think all Congressional committiees and meetings should be taped and put up for the public to see. Is there anytime in our history that we have done that CBM? I think the Dems are playing a dangerous game by doing that. I think if they actually took some the repubs ideas seriously and incorporated them they would find support for the public option.

“It’s hard for voters to figure out what’s going on, because members of Congress haven’t resolved the key issues.

Neither of my Reps, nor any I've heard yet, have ever been able to explain why the elimination of the mini-monopoly the insurance companies now enjoy within the artificial State market boundaries would not force market solutions that would expand choices as well as lower costs. Even Wolf Blitzer wonders...and Axlerod stumbles and fails, because he's been told to steer people away from this thought....because it might actuallywork.

IT. Here's a thought, why not roll out the final healthcare bill to the American public and let them review it for 30 days. Then take a vote/poll. It amazes me that the dems are critizing anyone that does not support the bill and the bill is not yet finished.

That would be mean, what, another $100 million of anti-reform television ads and at least half that much in lobbying? Make no mistake. All the talk about "slowing down" and wanting "more time" is not about what's in the bill. We already know 80% of what's in it and the other 20% is being worked out now. It's about giving the lobbyists more time to spread their money and lies. Heck, I give credit to Kansas Senator Pat Roberts for admitting as much in committee the other day. At least he was honest about it.

"All the Senator from Kentucky is asking is for 72 hours to determine the cost. Senator Snowe has spoken eloquently about sunshine, and the openness, and the fact that the American people would support this 90 percent, 95 percent. But the thing that I’m trying to point out is we would have at least 72 hours for the people that the providers have hired to keep up with all of the legislation that we pass around here, and the regulations that we pass around here, to say “hey, wait a minute. Have you considered this?” And that’s all I’m asking for — is not only cost, but also the content of a bill. And that 72 hours, I think, is highly, highly important." -- Senator Pat Roberts, (R - Kansas), 9/23/09.

"The people that the providers have hired" would, of course, be the corporate lobbyists.

I wish we would have passed the Fair Elections Now Act that would create public financing of campaigns before tackling health care and climate change. Maybe that would give politicians the nerve to vote based on what's in our best interests and not their campaign coffers.